Every town has one. You know the place: abandoned, dead-end street, overgrown with weeds and large old trees. The wraparound covered porch with boarded-up windows. Yes, I'm talking about the neighborhood-haunted house; and just as every town has one, every town also has young boys who attempt to earn a badge of honor by breaking into it.
Summer vacation was here. My friend "Ronny" and I had just finished a sleep-out under the stars that consisted of zero sleep, a lot of soda, junk food, and anything we could cook over the fire we were not allowed to make. Ronny was a bit off. He had a few facial scars and a large chip out of one front tooth, both attributable to doing something asinine. We were both at an age where girls were not yet interesting (unless you wanted to tease them); our balls, however, had descended enough to give us a bit of machismo.
So that summer, that week, that day, we had achieved the balls to enter that house.
Ronny led the way. He almost immediately found a tube of something on the porch. Conventional wisdom would dictate that you squeeze a tube of unknown contents while pointing it away from your face. But have I mentioned Ronny was a bit off? It was powdered graphite (probably dropped by a locksmith), and he blasted the tube all over his face.
"Never mind," he said, as he wiped himself, which just smeared it. "Let's go in." I followed, figuring that if we were attacked the demons would have to go over his large, lubricated body to get me.
Inside, as we entered through a broken window off the porch on the side, the house was dark. "A flashlight would have been a fucking nice touch," I muttered to myself as I followed Ronny across the room. My eyes adjusting, I spotted a set of stairs just beyond a large hole in the floor.
"Let's go up," Ronny said.
I muttered a weak, "Okay..."
The stairs were creaky, just like in the movies. Slowly we crept up, my heart pounding.
Suddenly we were at the top, facing a hallway with a closed door at the end.
"Oh, shit, did we put out the campfire?" I said in a lame attempt to call it quits.
"We'll just see what's behind the door and leave," Ronnie promised. We crept down the hallway to the end. Ronny opened the door. In the dim light, I could make out that it was a bathroom. Broken sink, broken toilet, and just a little bit of light peering through the shuddered window.
"Let's get out of here!" I pleaded. Ronny took two steps inside and froze in his tracks. He turned and looked me with a wild, scared look in his eyes and said, "We gotta get outta here NOW!"
Well, I didn't need a fucking Hallmark invitation. I turned and ran down the hall, taking the stairs three at a time. I cleared the hole in the floor and dove out the window like an Olympic gymnast. I ran around the porch, down the stairs, and out to the street where I collapsed. I was panting, and my heart was racing, but I knew that soon we would be laughing it all off.
"What the hell did you see, Ronny?!?" I screamed as I turned around.
Ronny? Ronny? Holy shit, he wasn't there.
Where was he? What the hell happened to him? I was scared shitless; but as friends go, Ronny was a good one, and I knew I had to go back and find him.
Trembling, I went back to the house, climbed the stairs, and walked around the porch to the side. "Ronny?" I called. No answer. I called again and heard a faint moan from around the corner.
I crept forward, expecting the worst. I turned the corner -- and there was Ronny, pants down, squatting over a mean, steaming pile of freshly-processed campfire food.
"What the fuck are you doing?" (As if I didn't already know.)
He looked up at me, with his graphite-smeared face and chipped-tooth grin. "Shitting."
He said later that he was already poking his BVD's when we entered the house, and the sight of a toilet drove him to the edge.
Ronny left the pile there, and it was probably there until the day they tore down the house. We soon discovered girls and never entered that house again.
Ronny's a cop now.
